The influence of digitalization on organizational resilience: Black Swans and antifragility

Nowadays, organizations are constantly facing new challenges and threats that may come in various forms, from both inside and outside companies’ boundaries. Natural disasters, pandemic diseases, terrorist attacks, economic recession, equipment failures, hacker attacks and human error are just a few examples of catastrophes that present them with new challenges and threats, both inside and outside the company borders. Such events, unpredictable and anomalous, with a huge impact on a large scale and completely unexpected, are generally labelled as Black Swans. The impacts experienced by such events transcend borders and geographic dimensions and negatively affect governments, businesses, transport, economic sectors and people. The era of digitization represents a new challenge for organizations, a means that could provoke new Black Swans and at the same time prevent others, multiplying the situations in which organizational skills are tested and creating highly competitive environments. Digital can therefore be considered on the one hand a driving force for the development of an organization, on the other a challenge for its resilience and antifragility. Technological change must be analysed not just as regards new business opportunities, but also with respect to potential vulnerabilities. The aim of this work is to understand the real effects of the digital transformation on the resilient characteristics of organizations. The research is based on a framework that articulates resilience into its key indicators, in order to create a link between organizational resilience and the trade-off of threats and opportunities caused by digitalization. The resilience transformation framework was used to analyse a case study in which evidence was provided of how the model can be applied in a backwards perspective, in order to understand how digitalization consolidates resilience in a real context and in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. The research shows that in the new millennium the company has transformed its business model, adopting a strategy that places sustainability at the centre of the value chain, making digitalization a key element at all levels and in all processes within company. The results clearly reflect the steps taken and the deep transformation of the company, accelerated in some way by the situations of profound turbulence caused by the pandemic. Indeed, the case study shows a highly connected digital infrastructure with a very high level of resilience.